ESSAY-REVIEW 445 



Hardy treats of in his opening verses, namely the fact that a 

 mind of such immense merit was scarcely recognised by con- 

 temporaries. But there is really no riddle in this. War, the 

 revealer, has held up the mirror to us as a nation and shown us 

 what an extremely dull people we are. In fact, we have ob- 

 tained the hegemony of the world partly by our exceptionally 

 lucky insular position, partly by our iron and coal, but chiefly 

 by the fact that we have produced an extraordinary amount of 

 the commodity called genius. Yet our men of genius are 

 always foreigners among the people, who generally treat them 

 exactly as cruelly as Swift figured that the Laputans treated their 

 immortal Struldbruggs ; and at the same time we attribute to 

 our own merits the prosperity which has been really given to us 

 by our great victims. This attitude was even apparent in the 

 England of Elizabeth — though, owing to the more recent 

 infusion of French blood at that time, our intellects were then 

 distinctly more acute than they are now. Indeed the Eliza- 

 bethan dramatists can scarcely be called English at all — they 

 were more French, Italian, and Spanish. For example Prof. 

 W. P. Ker indicates the close similarity between English and 

 Spanish literature of that day, and we know how much 

 Shakespeare and Spenser were indebted to Italian literature. 

 The magnificence of the Elizabethan dramatists depended 

 chiefly upon their logical and superb constructions, demanding 

 a southern mental clarity which is scarcely known in the 

 Britain of to-day, in which the power of construction has almost 

 vanished since the time of Clarissa Harlowe. Shortly after the 

 Elizabethan period, the mind of the country was darkened by 

 the puritanism of the Rebellion and the snobbery of the Restora- 

 tion, which became the Whiggism and Toryism of a later age 

 and the Radicalism and Conservatism of the present — all based 

 upon false theories of life. But even in the days of Elizabeth 

 the people were still too dull to grip the reality of genius — the 

 most wonderful phenomenon in nature ; so that they left us 

 almost no record of their principal men. There is really no 

 riddle about Shakespeare, because no notice would have been 

 taken of him as a man whoever he might have been short of a 

 peer or a politician. We know almost as little about Marlowe 

 and Spenser and many others of that period — they were all 

 Struldbruggs. It is impossible to understand why some people 

 seem to think that such men of genius should ever have attracted 



